Christopher White

Country

NZL

Affliliation

Whitireia Community Polytechnic

Biography

Christopher White has been a practising artist and lecturer in fine arts and printmaking for nearly 25 years. Born in the United Kingdom he studied printmaking at Camberwell School of Art in London graduating with a first class honours degree and a post-graduate in print-making. He was artist-in-residence for The National Maritime Museum, London (1996-1997) and has worked in freelance illustrating. In 1986 Chris was awarded Most Outstanding Artist under 35 by the Royal Society of British Watercolourists.
Christopher migrated to New Zealand in 1998 and completed a Masters in Fine Arts at Elam, Auckland University in 2002. He currently teaches drawing, painting and printmaking at Whitireia New Zealand. He also illustrates children_s picture books and was shortlisted for the LIANZA (Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa) Russell Clark Illustration award in 2008.

Paper

Convenientia and the Intaglio Landscape

Abstract

In this paper, I will use philosopher Michel Foucault's concept of convenientia from The Order of things - An archaeology of human sciences (1970), to compare the processes employed in the making and printing of intaglio surfaces with that of landscape erosion ' geomorphology. Foucault's text defines convenientia as one thing assimilating the nature of another adjacent to it. In this adjacency each connects - their fringes intermingle.
'First of all, convenientia. This word denotes the adjacency of places more strongly than it does similitude. Those things are 'convenient' which come sufficiently close to one another to be in juxtaposition; their edges touch, their fringes intermingle, the extremity of the one also denotes the beginning of the other. In this way, movement, influences, passions, and properties too, are communicated'for in this natural container, the world, adjacency is not an exterior relation between things, but the sign of a relationship, obscure though it may be.' (Foucault, 1970, p 18).
This concept is a good model for exploring the processes of intaglio, where impressions from eroded surfaces are imparted to paper through contact and pressure. My paper presents an odyssey showcasing the remarkable features of plates and prints housed by Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand and those from my own practice.